Movie Review: Fighting With My Family (2019)

Genre: Sports Biography  

Director: Stephen Merchant  

Starring: Florence Pugh, Lena Headey, Vince Vaughn, Nick Frost, Dwayne Johnson  

Running Time: 108 minutes  

Synopsis: In Norwich, England, working class couple Patrick and Julia (Nick Frost and Lena Headey) run a local semi-pro wrestling circuit featuring their teenaged children Zak and Raya (Jack Lowden and Florence Pugh). The family dreams of getting noticed by the World Wrestling Entertainment, and Zak and Raya are finally given an opportunity to audition in London. But WWE recruiter and coach Hutch (Vince Vaughn) only selects Raya for further training, and she jets off to Florida leaving Zak resentful. Raya adopts the stage name Paige as she attempts to qualify for the WWE, but she faces numerous challenges and an increasingly strained relationship with her family back home.

What Works Well: Plenty of heart ensures a warm glow in this biography of professional wrestler Paige, with a focus on humble roots and an unlikely path to stardom. The hardscrabble family background features sports-as-salvation from addictions and incarceration, with love, support, ambition, and humour fueling Paige's rise. She still has a lot to learn once her WWE training starts, and Florence Pugh invests in Paige's complex personal growth as she meets competitors from other backgrounds and navigates her brother's doldrums. Vince Vaughn builds a steady bridge between Norwich and glamour, and Dwayne Johnson enjoys a couple of prolonged scenes as himself. 

What Does Not Work As Well: The rags-to-riches story arc offers few surprises, leading to a high-volume final act filled with triumphalism, lacking subtlety, and compromised by a never-before-seen opponent.

Key Quote:

Raya (to Coach Hutch): You didn't cut me and I didn't quit.

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Movie Review: Hot Fuzz (2007)

Genre: Comedy Action  

Director: Edgar Wright  

Starring: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton  

Running Time: 121 minutes  

Synopsis: Overachieving Constable Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) of London's Metro Police is promoted to sergeant and shuffled off to the sleepy village of Sandford, Gloucestershire. He finds the local police service under Inspector Frank Butterman (Jim Broadbent) happy to generally do nothing as long as Sandford is competing for the Best Village award. Nicholas partners with Constable Danny Butterman (Nick Frost), the Inspector's son, and meets local supermarket owner Simon Skinner (Timothy Dalton) and other influential members of the Neighbourhood Watch Alliance. When a series of grisly "accidents" claim multiple lives, Nicholas is the only officer to believe a murderer is on the loose.

What Works Well: With Bad Boys II and Point Break as two favourite inspiration sources, this send-up of police action movies leverages all the cliches into over-the-top and mostly on-target comedy. Director Edgar Wright and his co-writer and star Simon Pegg deploy exaggerated violence and manic editing to also skewer traditional quaint English countryside attitudes. Pegg keeps a straight face as the way-too-serious cop who can never switch off, but humanity rises out of the carnage through the friendship he forges with Nick Frost's Danny Butterman. The supporting cast animates the pulse of a village with the darkest of underbellies.

What Does Not Work As Well: With focus meandering towards solving a slasher mystery, the running time drags on, and a couple of ultimately pointless chase scenes run out of breath. The all-guns-blazing final act leans more towards excessive action than wit, and is cluttered by a few too many barely defined side-characters.

Conclusion: Forget the gory deaths, find the missing swan.



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Movie Review: Shaun Of The Dead (2004)

A romantic comedy with zombies, Shaun Of The Dead finds plenty of laughs as a loser stumbles upon his purpose in life: fight-off zombie hordes and regain his girlfriend's love.

In London, 29-year-old sales assistant Shaun (Simon Pegg) is stuck in a stalled life. His girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield) is tired of spending every night at the Winchester Pub and threatens a break-up, preferring the company of her roommates David and Dianne (Dylan Moran and Lucy Davis). Shaun has two flatmates: his good friend Ed (Nick Frost) is jovial and jobless, while the more serious Pete (Peter Serafinowicz) is frustrated at both of them for being slobs and not getting on with life.

Meanwhile, a zombie apocalypse is unfolding in London, but Shaun is oblivious to the increasing number of blood-sucking walking corpses. Eventually Shaun and Ed come face to face with two zombies and realize the whole city is over-run by the deadly creatures. Shaun springs to action and devises a plan to rescue Liz and his mother Barbara (Penelope Wilton). But his father-in-law Philip (Bill Nighy) has already been bitten by a zombie, and taking refuge at the Winchester may not be the best of ideas.

A high-energy loony zombie comedy, Shaun Of The Dead thrives on a laid-back attitude, British humour, and lovable protagonists. Star Simon Pegg and director Edgar Wright co-wrote the screenplay and use the zombie apocalypse as a backdrop to several familiar themes, including squabbling roommates, a lovers' tiff and break-up, the flighty mum, tension between son and step-father, and the zombie-like routine of day-to-day life in the doldrums. Battling the undead becomes just another obstacle Shaun needs to overcome to put his life back together, once he decides to do so.

The opening act is patient, Wright taking his time filling in the admittedly limited details of Shaun's life. Try as he might this young man cannot do anything right, neither in his love life nor his career, but he does stand by his buddy Ed, who is even further behind the starting line of adulthood. As Shaun scrambles from his apartment to the local store then to work and the inevitable stop at the Winchester, his lifeless routine means he fails to see the increasing number of lifeless zombies roaming the streets.

Once Shaun and Ed finally come face to face with the apocalypse, Shaun Of The Dead kicks into a madcap gear and does not let up. The battles with the zombies are frequent and hilarious, Shaun finds the hero within, Ed discovers the joys of the outdoors, and together they make a formidable pair on a quest to save friends and family. Wright sometimes allows the tension within the group (Shaun and Liz's roommate David simply don't get along) to get in the way of the fun, but overall maintains durable momentum.

Many good people don't survive and tales of heroism abound; but the legend of Shaun Of The Dead will live forever down at the Winchester, where the namesake rifle over the bar may or may not be in working order.



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Movie Review: The World's End (2013)

A wayward invaders-amongst-us comedy, The World's End offers some fun but is hampered by a painful lack of ideas and weak execution.

In England, Gary King (Simon Pegg) is solidly in middle age and has wasted his life away. He still reminisces about the college night in Newton Haven when his group of friends attempted an epic pub crawl but only made it through nine of the twelve pubs before quitting. Gary reconnects with Andy (Nick Frost), Steven (Paddy Considine), Oliver (Martin Freeman), and Peter (Eddie Marsan) to convince them to try again and this time make it to all twelve establishments, ending at the appropriately named The World's End.

Other than Gary all the men have settled down into various careers and none are thrilled to see him, especially teetotaller Andy, but they humour their old friend mostly out of pity. They start the crawl again and bump into Oliver's sister Sam (Rosamund Pike), who had a quickie in the bathroom with Gary on that fateful college night. But more worrisome is the gentrified new look of the pubs, and the weird behaviour of the locals, soon exposed as robots with dark blue blood.

Combining routine middle aged male angst and overly-familiar something-strange-is-going-on-around-here into a comedy bowl, director and co-writer (with Pegg) Edgar Wright tries to wring a good time out of a tired premise. The success is patchy at best, as The World's End desperately searches for meaningful content, overreaching wildly in its climax towards explaining the entire human condition through an argument with a set of lights.

Despite plenty of fun to be had in the combat scenes between the easily fragmentable, blue ink spewing robots and the guys, Wright and Pegg falter in building their film on a shallow character base. Gary is a prototypical fast-talking (and mostly lying) drunk loser stuck in the glories of high school, and is not provided with any redeeming character arc. His four friends are generally blank slates, and The World's End trawls within a level of interchangeable disinterest.

Rosamund Pike as Sam suffers most of all, and it's not certain anyone knew why she was in the movie. Pierce Brosnan offers a glorified cameo as the college professor who makes an appearance during the second attempt at pub crawl completionism.

As for themes Wright and Pegg may be loosely aiming for, choose from the bland freedom-is-all-that-matters to friendship-is-forever hokum, with a pit stop at it's-better-to-be-a-down-and-out-bum-than-a-generic-robot revelation. It's all drowned in repetitive drinking and fighting scenes until the utterly unconvincing finale. The guys are trying to make it to the final pub, but neither the journey nor the destination are worthwhile.

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